Hovering, on the cusp of a new year,
or should I say wobbling;
It feels a bit yin-yang-ish,
a bit black and whitish,
though both black and white mutually embrace
– a radically inclusive, utterly seamless whole.
On one side,
a card game where some bad dudes seem to hold all the trumps,
– ecosystems and social systems torn apart in a nightmare
of human aided destruction and dissipation
so slow that we don’t see it happening and sometimes
so abruptly fast that we can’t believe it actually occurred.
– billions of miraculous people,
locked together in unconscious fascistic marching,
to the drum beat of a military/industrial/commercial/exploitative complex,
a parade of ominous feelings
willingness to trade the health and wellbeing of vibrant community for insularity,
obsessive control and the mechanization of everything;
an unexamined, deeply accepted, sense of fatalistic inevitability.
If this was all there is, I couldn’t call it a “wobble”.
It would be a complete collapse.
But this isn’t all there is!
Alongside a world of frightening grey are
uncountable presences of love and courage
and extraordinary demonstrations of creative patiently-persistent action.
There continues to be deep questioning, exploring, and bringing forth of immeasurable vastnesses: of astro-physical domains both inconceivably large and unimaginably small,
of ecologies of evolving living systems, interweaving diversities of life,
biology and social contracts – a rainbow spectrum of embodied knowing –
glimpsings of the blessing of deep time and immeasurable presence and possibility.
And permeating it all a seemingly innate miracle of inquisitiveness and enquiry that is both very precise and wondrously playful.
How does it all fit together?
How do we all fit together?
And,
How can we do this well?
Ultimately, I don’t think it is a wobble.
It really is a hovering – lightly, translucently – as we creatures of the universe survey a multi-billion-year mystery unfolding, this living that we are, a blessing of lives miraculous.
Adding one further dust mote to this momentous cresting wave of now is this message, an invitation to you to visit a newly redesigned Green Dharma Treasury.
Mary and I wish you all healthy and happy new year.
A New Look for Green Dharma Treasury
During the 1990s I would write two or three essays a year and share them with friends, students and interested people. These were sent via an internet mailing list, in the form PDF attachments. At that time it was suggested that I might create a website but with little experience with websites, I didn’t appreciate the value in doing this. More to the point, I was very busy with travel and teaching and was unwilling to put the time in for it. The urgings from others became more and more insistent, eventually culminating in January 2009, with friends Terry Walton and Clare Murphy of SpeakOutLoud.net offering to design, host, operate and pay for a website. This was a most generous offer that I couldn’t and didn’t refuse.
Greendharmatreasury.org first appeared in the early days of clunky technology and the unknowning that was my own lack of internet experience. At the time Mary and I had access to a ‘dial-up connection’ which was so frustratingly slow that it could take an hour or more to post a simple article! Over the years, with Terry and Clare’s patient support along with a newly available broadband connection where we lived, I came to really appreciate the site as an opportunity to share with others some of my enthusiasm for integrating Buddhist teaching and practice, with what I was increasingly seeing as a way of contemplative science.
In October, 2011, Alan Dodds came on board with an offer to rebuild the site (it had been hacked) thus supporting us with his immense experience in IT. Alan also provided invaluable advice that assisted the publication of some of my books, under the auspices of ‘Wangapeka Books’.
Today, Green Dharma Treasury has had a radical redesign and a shift in underlying architecture as we move to a wordpress.com format. Mira Riddiford of Caesura Effect Web Design has worked many long hours and has done a wonderful job in designing and birthing the new spacious look, particularly in adding to its current luminous quality in the form of copious images.
Finally, words cannot express the consistent support, both personal and public, from my partner Mary Jenkins, whose contribution to GDT is now expanding beyond her careful proof reading and editorial suggestions and is blossoming onto the site through the inclusion of many of her photographs made in the course of our journeying. Most of the photos on the site were taken by her. A few were clicked by me. A number were taken by others. Unfortunately we haven’t recorded who these others are but if you see an image that you took, please know that our thanks are flowing to you for so enhancing the beauty and thus usefulness of this site.
To Clare and Terry and Alan and Mira and Mary and unnamed others, my heartfelt thanks and appreciation go to you all.
Though the basic structure is now in place, the transformation of GDT is still in process. If you find that any of the links don’t work, please let us know. It is easy to miss some of the details.
Also on a practical note the old e-mail of <tarchin[at]greendharmatreasury[dot]org> is no long functional and as of now, it has been replaced by <greendharmatreasurytarchin[at]gmail.com>